


you gotta (it's a working title)

by taub



Category: House M.D., It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: M/M, and Chase i guess lmfao, kind of mentions of the D.E.N.N.I.S system, maybe OOC dennis, set during season 1 of Sunny and season 2 of House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 08:16:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5327081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taub/pseuds/taub
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Without gas stops or heavy traffic, the drive from Philadelphia to Princeton is approximately 50 minutes to an hour. It's not too long, they both think and it's always pretty rewarding when the trip is completed, though Dennis is getting a little worried with how frequently he's willing to do it for only one individual and that he's willing to drive out of town to get laid at all.</p><p> </p><p>ALTERNATE DESCRIPTION: </p><p>yikes why'd i do this.......</p>
            </blockquote>





	you gotta (it's a working title)

**Author's Note:**

> fhsjshsk alright alright alright so
> 
> 1) im not totally sure why i thought this ship was a good idea but i had to do it honestly  
> 2) as mentioned in the tags, the timeline is a bit off but generally it's set during season 1 of sunny and season 2 of house  
> 3) this could've been better but i havent written fics or anything that's not for a screenplay in months and i got this all done in one night in about two hours so i'm leavin it at least for the most part  
> 4) i was talkin about a house/sunny crossover fic on tumblr like months ago but if you somehow saw that this isn't the fic i meant i have another one i wanna do  
> 5) im realizing even more that The Team and The Gang are kind of equally fucked up and i LOVE IT

The first time Chase meets Dennis, it’s at a department store in Philadelphia. 

“The pink looks like shit, only a certain kind of man can pull off pink. Say an older man, probably a dad of several, someone non-predatory and not particularly remarkable in any way. Someone with a soft body type preferably as well,” Dennis tells Chase as he holds up a pink dress shirt and presses it against himself to get a general idea of how he’d look in it. “You’re too pretty to pull off pink, no blonde haired, blue eyed man could but especially not one like yourself.” Chase doesn’t reply as he is in a bit of awe, debating mentally if any of that was a backhanded compliment or not and if the man ever actually insulted him or just the shirt.

“Alright,” he finally says as he moves it away from himself to begin folding it. Dennis pulls it out of his hands and folds it himself and puts it back where Chase found it.

“I did that perfectly, even without the folding table that the employees at places like this use,” Dennis declares and Chase is pretty sure he hears a mumbled “good for nothing pieces of shit” afterward as well. 

\--------

The second time Chase sees Dennis is at a café in Princeton. Chase has his laptop out with one of the DVDs from a TV box set he bought in the CD cartridge and his headphones in. Dennis approaches him from behind with no warning, scaring him but causing him to merely jump and not punch.

“What are you watching?”

“’Law & Order’,” Chase states after pulling out his left headphone.

“Which one?”

“’SVU’,” Chase states and holds his headphone still close to his ear, hoping to return it too its place soon.

“The original one was the best one,” Dennis scoffs.

“I’m mostly watching it for Christopher Meloni,” Chase lightly laughs at his own joke.

“Then just watch ‘Oz’,” Dennis flares his nostrils a bit out of habit.

“I do watch ‘Oz’,” Chase smiles a bit. Dennis smirks though looks away from him.

“Aren’t you _from_ Oz?” Dennis says and Chase wants to say something about the terrible quality of the joke but he can tell Dennis is already embarrassed with himself and he kind of likes knowing that it was essentially a pick up line given the inflection and the overall vibe he got off of Dennis.

“What’s your name?” Chase asks as he finally rests his hand holding the headphone and pulls out the other as well and lets them lie on his keyboard as he pauses his episode. 

“Dennis Reynolds,” Dennis says proudly as he puts his hands on his hips. 

“Robert Chase,” Chase says, sounding a bit wobbly on his first name.

“I take it no one’s called you your first name in a while,” Dennis comments.

“Nope, my uh, my boss always just calls me ‘Chase’ so the whole hospital does too so I’m just kind of used to it by now,” Chase stutters a bit as he rambles, “I’m a doctor.”

“I’m a business owner, I haven’t got a boss,” Dennis boasts.

“What kind of a business do you own?” Chase asks genuinely out of curiosity but the source of that curiosity was mostly because he knew anyone so quick to brag about something like that must not actually be in a position of much power and have a solid business. 

“I’m a bar owner,” Dennis says quickly and defensively. “In Philly,” he adds as an afterthought. Chase nods, generally satisfied with the answer. 

“Nice,” Chase stated. Dennis sits down in the seat across from him and uses the pen from his coat pocket to write his phone number on a napkin.

\--------

“My friend, Charlie, has cancer,” Dennis opens his phone call to Chase with, making sure to include Charlie’s first name to propel Chase to empathize more.

“I’m not an oncologist if you’re calling me about treatment options,” Chase states plainly as he pins his phone between his shoulder and his ear as he shuffles through his fridge looking for his hot and sour soup he took home from P.F. Chang’s. 

“I know that,” Dennis nearly shouts out of defense. “All I had to do was google ‘Robert Chase MD Princeton’ to know that,” he fully shouts.

“So are you trying to use your friend having cancer to get me to sleep with you?” Chase asks as he leans back on his counter with his hand now holding his phone as he watches his soup spin around in the microwave.

“Well, no, I—“ Dennis starts, close to furious. “You can’t—I don’t—God—”

“It’s fine, you don’t even have to exploit your friend, all you have to do is ask,” Chase tells him without any anger or true sarcasm. 

Dennis stops calling him for weeks after he decides that just sleeping with Chase without any challenge would be too easy and that he was better than going for easy sex with whoever offers.

\--------

Dennis waits in the parking lot for Chase to leave the hospital, not fully anticipating for him to leave at 2 A.M. but he pulls through, the unexpected obstacle on top of the planned obstacle only makes things more fulfilling. He approaches Chase from behind once again as he goes to put a box in the trunk of his sedan. Chase jumps even further, this time with what could be considered a yelp. Dennis is immediately thankful he waited so long both because of the end effect and because the time of night made Dennis surprise Chase even more. 

“What do you want Dennis?” Chase asks as he catches his breath, though he’s more annoyed than angry or terrified which is slightly dissatisfying. 

“My friend doesn’t have cancer,” Dennis begins. “He was just faking it to get this waitress who he’s been stalking to sleep with him. She didn’t though and I ended up banging her,” Dennis smiles at himself. 

“That’s pretty brutal,” Chase says genuinely to every aspect of the story. 

“’Brutal’s the name of the game,” Dennis says though he realizes it doesn’t make full sense. After a silence of about thirty seconds, Dennis begins speaking again. “Do _you_ wanna bang?”

“I don’t know,” Chase says coyly and with a large grin on his face and he turns around to lean up against the back of his car. “I think you should take me out to dinner.”

Dennis knows Chase isn’t actually joking and they do go to dinner to a diner five miles from Chase’s apartment. Chase talks about his job a bit and about being an intensivist more specifically and he carefully avoids the family stuff and they eventually move onto movies and music and it goes perfectly like a date should in every sense and Dennis knows he’s finally reaching the home stretch. When they go back to Chase’s apartment, they take separate cars, somewhat to Chase’s dismay but Dennis wasn’t going to leave the Range Rover in the parking lot of a shady diner a state away from where he actually lived. 

\--------

When Dennis arrives home back from the drive from Princeton, Mac hounds him about safety and not knowing where Dennis was and the only way Dennis gets Mac to stop talking is by telling him he was sleeping with a dude. Mac leaves the living room and goes to his own bedroom and Dennis smiles to himself as he begins to text Chase. 

When he arrives at work within the next hour, Dee immediately starts in on him. 

“I heard from Mac, you’re banging some dude and I won’t get into all that but I wanna know what he’s like and what he looks like and all that. Mac mentioned that he was Australian or something,” Dee runs out of breath by the end and Dennis wondered if she was trying to be subtle about her potential or already growing attraction to Chase or not because he genuinely couldn’t tell. 

“I’m not telling you about him,” Dennis sneers. “First off, he wouldn’t even like you, he already has enough needy girls and you’re needy and you’re a whore, second, just no way, I’m the one sleeping with this guy, not you— and you’re not gonna,” Dennis runs out of breath himself. 

“I’m not a whore,” Dee frowns, “you’re a whore.”

“Yeah, but I’m better at it,” Dennis smirks to himself.

\--------

Dennis finds out one night while Chase is eating a hot pocket in bed after a hand that his mom died from alcoholism and that his dad left them and gave him the money to let him go through med school essentially to boost his own image within the medical community, and Dennis really didn’t know what to say to any of it. He learns about more prominent similarities between the two of them as well as the biggest didferences more than ever.

“My department gets kind of shit funding,” Chase says through a bite. “We have one of the best diagnosticians out there, often called the best but there’s always someone better but anyway, one of the best diagnosticians out there, a fairly highly sought after specialty, and a pretty highly qualified team if I say so myself. We have a neurologist, just a fucking great neurologist, an immunologist, the one that I slept with when she was on meth, and an intensivist, ‘ya know, _me_ , and it’s like the dream team of individual specialties working for this nephrologist and immunologist who’s just brilliant and acclaimed and we really don’t get shit compared to the rest of the hospital except maybe like orthopedics but even then they’re orthopedics, and even just compared to the rest of the population, we’re all middle class. House is maybe upper-middle class but I’m pretty sure if he is, he pisses away whatever adds the ‘upper’ after the ‘middle’.

“And in a sense, he’s to blame. He acts like a jackass to everyone, especially the hospital administrator. Last year he was just being an unnecessarily defiant fuck and the hospital lost this one donor who became the chairman of the board and gave us like 100 million dollars or something and I talked to him and it became this whole thing between me and House but _anyway_. So he’s just completely opposed to any kind of instruction or authority and he eats up a ton of money with malpractice insurance, the most out of anyone in the hospital which is saying something, but _even then_. Most people think because we’re like the only diagnostics department in the world that we’re just fucking _rolling_ in it, but we’re not. Not even House. And because we are alone and take one case like every three to four weeks, we really don’t get paid much. And it’s not like I care about people _thinking_ I have money, I don’t give a shit about class, I just want to live somewhere with a garage of my own and I think it’s bullshit what we get paid for what we do.”

 

Dennis just stares at him without saying a word like he did throughout the entire rant. Chase finishes his hot pocket as he never truly stopped eating it throughout any of the time he spent talking. They sit there in a comfortable silence for a while and finally after Chase finishes the other hot pocket he had on his nightstand, they both just go to bed without a word and it’s oddly gratifying. 

 

Dennis and Chase flat out don’t really talk at all for a couple of weeks, but it’s not bad, neither of them are upset at all, they just don’t feel like talking and it’s okay. Dennis drives back to Philly the morning after he found out about Chase’s family and his department and all that. He knows he’s never felt like this before with someone, feeling nice not talking to them but not in a relieved way because he knows they’re going to meet again and talk again, they’re both just mellowing out. He always wants to fill the spaces, always wants to be doing something or saying something, trying to prevent not feeling but he’s slowly realizing he can feel without action and it almost scares him enough to want to do something. 

He stays pretty lowkey for a while, until the whole deal with the gym teacher and Charlie’s intervention and feeling dissatisfied that he never came out the clear victor over Dee when it came to psychology. When he sees Chase again he tries not to talk about any of that and instead they eat and Chase burns CDs from Dennis and they end up sleeping together a few times and the whole shebang. It’s nice. 

\--------

Dennis tries to start picking up women again to stop his streak of going back to see the same person over and over again and he’s unsuccessful, always ending up freaking them out and sabotaging himself at his own game. He wants to just start screaming but he doesn’t want to draw too much attention so he just kicks the wall outside the bar really hard one night and starts smoking and pacing to calm down and he ends up just being more anxious but with sore calves. 

“You alright dude?” Charlie asks as he exits the bar. Dennis flinches and inhales sharply, not realizing anyone was even in the bar before he kicked the wall. 

“Yeah, I’m all good,” Dennis says quickly, trying to catch his breath, not even thinking to be offended at Charlie’s question. Dennis let himself off the hook mentally for not making some comment about Charlie sharing a futon with his dad as he was far too preoccupied and still in minor shock.

“Okay, goodnight man,” Charlie waves. 

“You too,” Dennis replies, though probably not loudly enough to be heard.

\--------

Dennis really likes Chase’s hair and the slope of his nose and how the distance between his eyes makes him look like a cat and how he has thicker lips but they’re spread out enough to not look odd or disproportionate. He really likes his Chase’s face is more triangular, adding to the cat look, but still angular and not too similar to Dennis’s. He likes that Chase’s nose has a somewhat boxy and accentuated tip but not like the Waitress who has a stubby nose but the same tip and how Chase has really deep set eyes and creased eyelids that make his eyes pop out more. He feels bad for himself, for the coworker who slept with him when she thought she had HIV, for anyone who’s ever been with Chase or seen him and thought about it. He won’t let Dee or Charlie or Mac or even his dad see Chase because he doesn’t want anyone to feel about him even remotely the same way Dennis does. 

\--------

The next time they stop talking, it’s tense and the previously relaxed and satisfying feeling completely gone. They’re both on edge for weeks and know it even though they’re about an hour apart with no contact and no previous fights. After a week and a half when they see each other again, Dennis having driven up to Princeton as Chase never drives to Philadelphia which is finally really pissing Dennis off, Dennis snaps at Chase almost as soon as Chase answers the door. 

“What the fuck is going on with you?” Dennis yells, making sure to use ‘you’ to push Chase to be more compelled to explain himself specifically. 

“One of my coworkers just nearly died from an infection he got from searching one of our patient’s homes, after the patient himself died of the same exact thing, and I think I like my other coworker, the one who I decided to sleep with after I knew she was doing drugs because she thought she might have HIV,” Chase shouted back exasperatedly, trying to mix minor self pity, exhaustion, and defiance all into his delivery. 

“So what? You stop talking to me? At least be a goddamn man and tell me that you wanna fuck someone else so then I know what if I can or cannot do the same thing myself and so I can decide if I wanna stop driving up here and parking my Range Rover in your shitty apartment garage and having my twin sister practically harass me wanting to have you all because my jackass roommate told her you were Australian and—and listening to you complain about being a doctor and how Dead or Alive’s better than Human League even though I mean I agree with you on that one and—” Dennis keeps on approaching tears the more he goes on so he stops himself. He finally blinks and lets a couple roll out so he can stop feeling them just sitting there and making him physically uncomfortable. 

“I’m sorry about your sister,” Chase laughs to fill the space himself, something he’s started to do more and more often. He’s feeling very emotional himself but he’s kind of glad Dennis seems to be taking the cake so far.

“It’s okay, the only guys she fuck are like loser politicians and homeless guys and anyone else just shady and gross within our zip code,” Dennis laughs and snorts by accident. 

“Reminds me to call my sister,” Chase chuckles. Dennis gives him a look. “N-not because she’s a whore who fucks like city council members and bums but just because I haven’t talked to my sister in a while.” Dennis laughs and Chase joins in and they return to the mutual feeling of comfortability they’d had over a month prior, except this time with a feeling of finality. 

Dennis drives back to Philadelphia that night and as soon as he hits the room Mac can sense that something’s off and he can quickly deduce what. He nods at Dennis as they pass in the kitchen and that’s all they say, he doesn’t want to force Dennis to talk. 

\--------

Dennis returns to his routine of courting women for personal sport and Chase begins courting Cameron, though with a different intent and method. 

“So we are done then. man?” Dennis texts Chase one day, trying to be as grammatically correct as possible with a T-9 keyboard and getting a bit angry at himself as he feels he sounds a bit too much when he's texting like Charlie does when he's speaking. 

“U betcha” Chase sends back and snorts to himself. Dennis does the same thing as he reads the text. 

Over the course of time, every time he thinks about what happened with Chase and how far he veered off the path he rationalized that he ended up being more accomplished with Chase versus his standard hookup routine because he _did_ keep on seeing him and keeping him on the hook and still managing to separate entirely. He doesn’t sleep for any other dudes for a while though which he still hasn’t come up with an explanation for. He’ll figure it out, he’s got time.


End file.
